A place where I can make you feel what it is like to work in an office, whether you want to or not.

Thursday, September 25, 2008

Crash and Burn

You never truly know how much you depend on technology until it is ripped out from under your like that scene in Ghostbusters with Bill Murray and the tablecloth.

Last Thursday the VP of IT sends out an e-mail about a potential virus that is affecting some people’s computers and to be really careful about opening e-mails and using the internet for non-company purposes. Okay, no big deal. Sure, I am known to surf the web when I am bored but I have been so bloody busy at work that I haven’t had time to indulge. And I never use my work e-mail for personal stuff. That means no silly pictures or chain letters telling me I will die if I don’t pass it onto co-workers.

A few hours later, some of us notice that our computers are not acting the way they are supposed to. You know, locking up, not saving properly, etc. We don’t think much of it. That is, until you started to look around the prairie dog village that is our cubicles and see heads rise up like a game of whack-a-mole.

It was the virus. At first, only a few people we infected and told to shut down their computers. But then is spread. Within like three hours our lovely little office had been turned into a Michael Criton novel.

But we have confidence in our IT team, so we all go home and try not to think about it. Well, I tried not to think about it. Apparently some of my co-workers were starting to freak out. And as it turns out, they had a right to freak out because we all showed up for work on Friday and NONE OF THE COMPUTERS WORKED!!!

It was horrible. Clients were calling in and there was basically nothing we could do. The poor IT team looked like they had slept in their clothes. I had a woman call me unprofessional, just because a freakin’ virus had shut down my computer.

Well, to make a long story short (too late) it is now Wednesday and we still aren’t up to full speed. I am one of the few who seems to have the ability to print. Hopefully by the end of the week we will be back to normal.

But this who situation has taught me 2 things:1) Always back up your hard drive2) There are assholes in the world. The kind of assholes who live in their moms basements and play World of Warcraft in between writing visrus’s to shut down computers and jerking off to their little sister’s Hannah Montana poster.So don’t be an asshole.